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Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Specialist for the IBM System Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2011, Tony celebrated his 25th year anniversary with IBM Storage on the same day as the IBM's Centennial. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services. You can also follow him on Twitter @az990tony.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson
)

Over on his Backup Blog, fellow blogger Scott Waterhouse from EMC has a post titled
[Backup Sucks: Reason #38]. Here is an excerpt:

Unfortunately, we have not been able to successfully leverage economies of scale in the world of backup and recovery. If it costs you $5 to backup a given amount of data, it probably costs you $50 to back up 10 times that amount of data, and $500 to back up 100 times that amount of data.

If anybody can figure out how to get costs down to $40 for 10 times the amount of data, and $300 for 100 times the amount of data, they will have an irrefutable advantage over anybody that has not been able to leverage economies of scale.

I suspect that where Scott mentions we in the above excerpt, he is referring to EMC in general, with products like
Legato. Fortunately, IBM has scalable backup solutions, using either a hardware approach, or one purely with software.

Hardware Approach

The hardware approach involves using deduplication hardware technology as the storage pool for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). Using this approach, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager would receive data from dozens, hundreds or even thousands
of client nodes, and the backup copies would be sent to an IBM TS7650 ProtecTIER data deduplication appliance, IBM TS7650G gateway, or IBM N series with A-SIS. In most cases, companies have standardized on the operating systems and applications used on these nodes, and multiple copies of data reside across employee laptops. As a result, as you have more nodes backing up, you are able to achieve benefits of scale.

Software Approach

Perhaps your budget isn't big enough to handle new hardware purchases at this time, in this economy. Have no fear,
IBM also offers deduplication built right into the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager v6 software itself. You can use sequential access disk storage pool for this. TSM scans and identifies duplicate chunks of data in the backup copies, and also archive and HSM data, and reclaims the space when found.

If your company is using a backup software product that doesn't scale well, perhaps now is a good time to switch over to IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. TSM is perhaps the most scalable backup software product in the marketplace, giving IBM an "irrefutable advantage" over the competition.

Continuing my week in Chicago, for the IBM Storage Symposium 2008, I attended two presentations on XIV.

XIV Storage - Best Practices

Izhar Sharon, IBM Technical Sales Specialist for XIV, presented best practices using XIV in various environments.He started out explaining the innovative XIV architecture: a SATA-based disk system from IBM can outperformFC-based disk systems from other vendors using massive parallelism. He used a sports analogy:

"The men's world record for running 800 meters was set in 1997 by Wilson Kipketer of Denmark in a time of 1:41.11.

However, if you have eight men running, 100 meters each, they will all cross the finish line in about 10 seconds."

Since XIV is already self-tuning, what kind of best practices are left to present? Izhar presented best practicesfor software, hosts, switches and storage virtualization products that attach to the XIV. Here's some quickpoints:

Use as many paths as possible.

IBM does not require you to purchase and install multipathing software as other competitors might. Instead, theXIV relies on multipathing capabilities inherent to each operating system.For multipathing preference, choose Round-Robin, which is now available onAIX and VMware vSphere 4.0, for example. Otherwise, fixed-path is preferred over most-recently-used (MRU).

Encourage parallel I/O requests.

XIV architecture does not subscribe to the outdated notion of a "global cache". Instead, the cache is distributed across the modules, to reduce performance bottlenecks. Each HBA on the XIV can handle about 1400requests. If you have fewer than 1400 hosts attached to the XIV, you can further increase parallel I/O requests by specifying a large queue depth in the host bus adapter (HBA).An HBA queue depth of 64 is a good start. Additional settings mightbe required in the BIOS, operating system or application for multiple threads and processes.

For sequential workloads, select host stripe size less than 1MB. For random, select host stripe size larger than 1MB. Set rr_min_io between ten(10) and the queue depth(typically 64), setting it to half of the queue depth is a good starting point.

If you have long-running batch jobs, consider breaking them up into smaller steps and run in parallel.

Define fewer, larger LUNs

Generally, you no longer need to define many small LUNs, a practice that was often required on traditionaldisk systems. This means that you can now define just 1 or 2 LUNs per application, and greatly simplifymanagement. If your application must have multiple LUNs in order to do multiple threads or concurrent I/O requests, then, by all means, define multiple LUNs.

Modern Data Base Management Systems (DBMS) like DB2 and Oracle already parallelize their I/O requests, sothere is no need for host-based striping across many logical volumes. XIV already stripes the data for you.If you use Oracle Automated Storage Management (ASM), use 8MB to 16MB extent sizes for optimal performance.

For those virtualizing XIV with SAN Volume Controller (SVC), define manage disks as 1632GB LUNs, in multiple of six LUNs per managed disk group (MDG), to balance across the six interface modules. Define SVC extent size to 1GB.

XIV is ideal for VMware. Create big LUNs for your VMFS that you can access via FCP or iSCSI.

Organize data to simplify Snapshots.

You no longer need to separate logs from databases for performance reasons. However, for some backup productslike IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) for Advanced Copy Services (ACS), you might want to keep them separatefor snapshot reasons. Gernally, putting all data for an application on one big LUNgreatly simplifies administration and snapshot processing, without losing performance.If you define multiple LUNs for an application, simply put them into the same "consistencygroup" so that they are all snapshot together.

OS boot image disks can be snapshot before applying any patches, updates or application software, so that ifthere are any problems, you can reboot to the previous image.

Employ sizing tools to plan for capacity and performance.

The SAP Quicksizer tool can be used for new SAP deployments, employing either the user-based orthroughput-based sizing model approach. The result is in mythical unit called "SAPS", which represents0.4 IOPS for ERP/OLTP workloads, and 0.6 IOPS for BI/BW and OLAP workloads.

If you already have SAP or other applications running, use actual I/O measurements. IBM Business Partners and field technical sales specialists have an updated version of Disk Magic that can help size XIV configurations fromPERFMON and iostat figures.

The results were quite impressive. There was more than enough performance for tier 2 application workloads,and most tier 1 applications. The performance was nearly linear from the smallest 6-module to the largest 15-module configuration. Some key points:

A full 15-module XIV overwhelms a single SVC 8F4 node-pair. For a full XIV, consider 4 to 8 nodes 8F4 models, or 2 to 4 nodes of an 8G4. For read-intensive cache-friendly workloads, an SVC in front of XIV was able to deliver over 300,000 IOPS.

A single node TS7650G ProtecTIER can handle 6 to 9 XIV modules. Two nodes of TS7650G were needed to drivea full 15-module XIV. A single node TS7650 in front of XIV was able to ingest 680 MB/sec on the seventh day with17 percent per-day change rate test workload using 64 virtual drives. Reading the data back got over 950 MB/sec.

For SAP environments where response time 20-30 msec are acceptable, the 15-module XIV delivered over 60,000 IOPS. Reducing this down to 25,000-30,000 cut the msec response time to a faster 10-15 msec.

These were all done as internal lab tests. Your mileage may vary.

Not surprisingly, XIV was quite the popular topic here this week at the Storage Symposium. There were many moresessions, but these were the only two that I attended.

Continuing my week in Chicago for the IBM Storage and Storage Networking Symposium and System x and BladeCenter Technical Conference, I presented a variety of topics.

Hybrid Storage for a Green Data Center

The cost of power and cooling has risen to be a #1 concern among data centers. I presented the following hybrid storage solutions that combine disk with tape. These provide the best of both worlds, the high performance access time of disk with the lower costs and reduced energy consumption of tape.

Not only do these help reduce energy costs, they provide an overall lower total cost of ownership (TCO) thantraditional WORM optical or disk-only storage configurations.

The Convergence of Networks - Understanding SAN, NAS and iSCSI in the Data Center Network

This turned out to be my most popular session. Many companies are at a crossroads in choosing data and storage networking solutions in light of recent announcements from IBM and others. In the span of 75 minutes, I covered:

Block storage concepts, storage virtualization and RAID levels

File system concepts, how file systems map files to block storage

Network Attach Storage, the history of the NFS and CIFS protocols, Pros and Cons of using NAS

Storage Area Networks, the history of SAN protocols including ESCON, FICON and FCP, Pros and Cons of using SAN

IP SAN technologies, iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Pros and Cons of using this approach

Network Convergence with Infiniband and Fibre Channel over Convergence Enhanced Ethernet (FCoCEE), why Infiniband was not adopted historically in the marketplace as a storage protocol, and the features and enhancements of Convergence Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) needed to merge NAS, SAN and iSCSI traffic onto a single converged data center network [DCN]

Yes, it was a lot of information to cover, but I managed to get it done on time.

In conferences like these, there are two types of product-level presentations. An "Overview" explains howproducts work today to those who are not familiar with it. An "Update" explains what's new in this version of the product for those who are already familiar with previous releases. I decided to combine these into one sessionfor IBM's new version of [Tivoli Storage Productivity Center].I was one of the original lead architects of this product many years ago, and was able to share many personalexperiences about its evolution in development and in the field at client facilities.Analysts have repeatedly rated IBM Productivity Center as one of the top Storage Resource Management (SRM) tools available in the marketplace.

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Overview

Can you believe I have been doing ILM since 1986? I was the lead architect for DFSMS which provides ILM support for z/OS mainframes. In 2003-2005, I spent 18 months in the field performingILM assessments for clients, and now there are dozens of IBM practitioners in Global Technology Services andSTG Lab Services that do this full time. This is a topic I cover frequently at the IBM Executive Briefing Center[EBC], because it addressesseveral top business challenges:

Reducing costs and simplifying management

Improving efficiency of personnel and application workloads

Managing risks and regulatory compliance

IBM has a solution based on five "entry points". The advantage of this approach is that it allows our consultants to craft the right solution to meet the specific requirements of each client situation. These entry points are:

I did not get as many attendees as I had hoped for this last one, as I was competing head-to-head in the same time slot as Lee La Frese covering IBM's DS8000 performance with Solid State Disk (SSD) drives, John Sing covering Cloud Computing and Storage with SoFS, and Eric Kern covering IBM Cloudburst.

I am glad that I was able to make all of my presentations at the beginning of the week, so that I can then sit back and enjoy the rest of the sessions as a pure attendee.

Today we had several for the IBM System Storage product line. Here are some of them:

DS8000 gets thinner, leaner and faster

The 4.3 level of microcode for the IBM System Storage DS8000 series disk systems [announced enhancements] for both fixed block architecture (FBA) LUNs and count key data (CKD) volumes.

For FBA LUNs that attach to Linux, UNIX and Windows distributed systems, IBM announced DS8000 Thin Provisioning native support. Of course, many people already had this by putting IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) in front, but now DS8000 clients out there without SVC can also achieve benefits ofthin provisioning. This support also improves quick initialization a whopping 2.6 times faster.

For CKD volumes attached to z/OS on System z mainframes, IBM announced zHPF multitrack support for z/OS 1.9 and above. zHPF provide high performance FICON performance, and can now handle multitrack I/O transfers foreven better performance for zFS, HFS, PDSE, and extended striped data sets.

XIV gets better connected

A lot of XIV[announced enhancements] and preview announcements centered around better connectivity. Here's a run down:

Better host attachment connectivity by beefing up the interface modules that hold the FCP and iSCSI interface cards. XIV disk arrays have 3 to 6 of these in different configurations, and since they manage both their own disks,as well as receive host I/O requests for other disks, are basically doing double-duty.These interface modules can now be ordered as [Dual-CPU] modules.

Better infrastructure management by connecting XIV with the industry standard SMI-S interface to IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. Now, XIV can be part of the single pane of glass console that manages all of your other disk arrays, tape libraries and SAN fabrics.

Better copy services for backups by connecting XIV with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Advanced Copy Services. TSM for Advanced Copy Services is application aware and can coordinate XIV Snapshots similar to its current support for SVC and DS8000 FlashCopy capabilities.

Better connectivity to security systems by supporting LDAP credentials. Before, you had individual userid and passwords for each XIV, and these were probably different than all the other userid/password combinations you have for every other box on your data center floor. IBM is working on getting all products to support theLightweight Directory Access Protocol, or [LDAP] so that we can reach the nirvana of "single sign-on",one userid/password per administrator for all IT devices in the company.

Better remote copy support by connecting to sites far, far away. IBM previewed that it will provideasynchronous disk mirroring from one XIV to another XIV natively. Before this, XIV's synchronous mirroring was limited to 300km distances. Many of our clients do long distance global mirroring of their XIV today behind an SVC, but again, for those out there that don't yet have an SVC, this can be a reasonable alternative.

In what some might consider a surprising move, IBM announced a "no dedupe" licensing option on their premiere deduplication solution, which somewhat reminds me of IBM's NOCOPY option on DS8000 FlashCopy. At first I thought "Are you kidding me?!?!" However, this new license option allows the TS7650 appliance to compete with other virtual tape libraries (VTL) that do not offer deduplication capability on an even playing field. It also allows TS7650 to be used for data that doesn'tdedupe very well, such as seismic recordings, satellite images, or what have you. There are also clients who do not yet feel comfortable to dedupe their financial records for compliance reasons.This option now allows IBM to withdraw from marketing the TS7530 non-dedupe library. Having one technology thatdoes both dedupe and no-dedupe is better than offering two separate libraries based on different technologies.

The ProtecTIER series also announced [IP remote distance replication]. This can be used to replicate virtualtape cartridges in one ProtecTIER over to another ProtecTIER at a remote location. You can decide to replicateall or just a subset of your virtual tapes, and this feature can be used to migrate, merge or split ProtecTIERconfigurations as your needs grow. Before this support, our TS7650G clients replicated the disk repositoryusing native disk array replication technology, such as Global Mirror on the DS8000, but that meant that all data was replicated over to the secondary site. Now, with this new IP replication feature, you can be selective, and replicate only those virtual tapes that are mission critical.

The appliance now supports up to 36TB of disk capacity, and the new "IBM i" operating system on System i servers,formerly known as i5/OS.

GPFS does Windows

IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) has the lion's marketshare of file systems used in the [Top 500 Supercomputers]. For a while, it was limited to just Linux and AIX operating system support, but version 3.3 [extends this to Windows 2008 on 64-bit architectures]. GPFS isthe file system used in IBM's Scale-Out File Services, the underlying technology of IBM's Cloud Computing and Storage offerings.

Now that the frozen economy is starting to thaw, I have been traveling like crazy this month. So far, I have been to Rochester, MN, Los Angeles and San Diego, CA, and now currently in Austin, TX. On the plus side, I was able to enjoy the [Fourth of July] holiday weekend on the beaches of San Diego.

(If you have not been to California beaches lately, here's a quick [video] reminder)

So the big news this week is that the auction over Data Domain is over, and EMC's bid finally won over NetApp. Both NetApp and EMC have data deduplication capabilities in their existing product lines, but neither could compete against IBM's TS7650G ProtecTIER Data Deduplication gateway and TS7650 ProtecTIER appliances, and so were hell-bent to buy Data Domain for large amounts. The final price agreed upon was over two billion US dollars for Data Domain.

For the most part, Data Domain's products are targeted towards small and medium sized businesses, whereas IBM's TS7650 and TS7650G products targets medium and larger sized enterprises.So now that EMC has a viable data deduplication solution, it looks like it will be yet another IBM-vs-EMC debate going forward.

Continuing this week's theme of doing important things without leaving town, I present our results foran exciting project I started earlier this year.

For seven weeks, my coworker Mark Haye and I voluntarily led a class of students here in Tucson, Arizona in an after-school pilot project to teach the ["C" programming language] using [LEGO® Mindstorms® NXT robots]. The ten students, boys and girls ages 9 to 14 years old, were already part of the FIRST [For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology] program, and participated in FIRST Lego League[FLL] robot competitions.Since the students were already familiar building robots, and programming them with a simple graphical system of connecting blocks that perform actions. However, to compete in the next level of robot competitions, FIRST Tech Challenge [FTC],we need to leave this simple graphical programming behind, and upgrade to more precise "C" programming.

Mark is a software engineer for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and has participated in FLL competitions over the past nine years. This week, he celebrates his 25th anniversary at IBM, and I celebrate my 23rd. The teacher, Ms. Ackerman, and the students referred to us as "Coach Mark" and "Coach Tony".

This was the first time I had worked with LEGO NXT robots. For those not familiar with these robots, you can purchase a kit at your localtoy store. In addition to regular LEGO bricks, beams, and plates, there are motors, wheels, and sensors. A programmable NXT brick has three outputs (marked A,B, and C) to control three motors, and four inputs (marked 1,2,3,4) to receive values from sensors. Programs are written and compiled on laptops and then downloaded to the NXT programmable brick through an USB cable, or wirelessly via Bluetooth.

In the picture shown, an image of the Mars planetary surface is divided into a grid with thick black lines.A light sensor between the front two wheels of the robot is over the black line.

We used the [RobotC programming firmware] and integrated development environment (IDE) from [Carnegie Mellon University].The idea of this pilot was to see how well the students could learn "C". With only a few hours after class on each Wednesday, could we teach young students "C" programming in just seven weeks?

My contribution? I have taught both high school and college classes, and spent over 15 years programming for IBM, so Mark asked me to help.We started with a basic lesson plan:

Week 1

A brief history of the "C" language

Understanding statements and syntax

Setting motor speed and direction

Compiling and downloading your first program

Week 2

Understanding the "while" loop

Retrieving input sensor values

Week 3

Understanding the "if-then-else" statement

Defining variables with different data types

Manipulating string variables

Writing a program for the robot to track along a black line on a white background.

Week 4

Understanding local versus global scope variables

Writing a program for a robot to count black lines as it crosses them.

Week 5

Defining functions

Perform left turns, right turns, and to cross a specific number of lines on a grid pattern to move the robot to a specific location.

Weeks 6and 7

Mission Impossible: come up with a challenge to make the robot do something that would be difficult to accomplish using the previous NXT visual programming language.

At the completion of these seven weeks, I sat down to interview "Coach Mark"on his thoughts on this pilot project.

Why "C"?

This is a practical programming skill. The "C" language is used throughout the world to program everything from embedded systems to operating systems, and even storage software. This would allow the robots to handle more precise movements, more accurate turns, and more complicated missions.

Can kids learn "C" in only seven weeks?

Part of the pilot project was to see how well the students could understand the material. They were already familiar with building the robots, and understood the basics of programming sensors and motors, so we were hoping this was a good foundation to work from. Some kids managed very well, others struggled.

Did everything go according to plan?

The first two weeks went well, turning on motors and having robots move forward and backward were easy enough. We seemed to lose a few students on week 3, and things got worse from there. However, several of the students truly surprised us and managed to implement very complicated missions. We were quite pleased with the results.

What kind of problems did the kids encounter?

Touch sensor required loops waiting for pressing. Motors did not necessarily turn as expected until more advanced methods were used. Making 90 degree left and right turns accurately was more difficult than expected.

Any funny surprises?

Yes, we had a Challenge Map representing the Mars planetary surface from a previous FLL competition that was dark red and divided into squares with thick black lines. An active light sensor returns a value of "0" (complete darkness) to "100" (bright white).However, the Mars surface had craters that were dark enough to be misinterpreted as a black line causing some unusual results. This required some enhanced programming techniques to resolve.

Did robots help or hurt the teaching process?

I think they helped. Rather than writing programs that just display "Hello World!" on a computer screen, the students can actually see robots move, and either do what they expect, or not!

And when the robots didn't do what they were expected to?

The students got into "debug" mode. They were already used to doing this from previous FLL competitions, but with RobotC, you can leave the USB cable connected (or use wireless Bluetooth) and actually gather debugging information while the robot is running, to see the value of sensors and other variables and help determine why things are not working properly.

Any applicability to the real world of storage?

We have robots in the IBM System Storage TS3500 tape library. These robots scan bar code labels, pull tapes out of shelves and mount them into drives.The programming skills are the same needed for storage software, suchas IBM Tivoli Storage Manager or IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.

The world is becoming smarter, instrumented with sensors, interconnected over a common network, and intelligent enough to react and respond correctly. The lessons of reading sensor values and moving motors can be considered the first step in solutions that help to make a smarter planet.

This week I am in Costa Rica to celebrate[Earth Day] and promote IBM's [Smarter Planet strategy] to help solve the world's energy and environmental problems. This is thethird in the series. The first two posts were:

Here in Costa Rica, they separate their recyclables, and encourage even the hotel guests from other countries to do the same. See my photo on the left for an example.

This is more than most in the United States will do. We're lucky to get North Americans to just separate all recyclables in one bin separate from all trash in a second bin.

Leaving Arenal, I went to Escazu, a suburb of San Jose, the capital of this country. I met with Patrick, one of the owners of [Exclusive Excursions Travel] that helped me organize the eco-tourism portion of this trip to Costa Rica.

Most people are familiar with the [star rating system] that rank most hotels from one star (budget class/economy) to five stars (deluxe/luxury). The nicest hotel I've been to was the [Burj Al Arab] in Dubai, which claims a seven star rating. For eco-tourism, there is a similar "Green Leaf" rating system. According to Patrick,the Instituto Costarricense de Turismo [ICT] (tourism board of Costa Rica) rates hotels from one leaf (adopting some measures, like separating recyclables shown above) to five leaves (entirely carbon neutral).This Green Leaf system seems more important to European and Canadian tourists, but those from United States may not even be aware of it.

The food at these hotels vary. The typical dish here for breakfast, lunch and dinner is the Casado, consisting of mostly rice and beans. I have found thatCosta Rica has come up with as many creative ways to combine rice and beans in various proportions as Starbucks® serve various combinations of coffee and milk.The locals might be accustomed to a steady diet of rice and beans for every meal of every day, but those of us from North America aren't! Not counting tourist flatulence, Costa Rica has[pledged to be carbon neutral by 2021], the country's 200th birthday.

Sadly, most folks in the United States don't categorize their hotels with a Green Leaf rating system, nor do they even bother to categorize their recyclables. I spent 18 months in the field doing Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) assessments for clients, and most didn't categorize their data either.So, the next time you have some combination of coffee and milk, whether its a Latte, Misto, Espresso, or Macchiato, remember that the coffee came from acountry trying to be more environmentally responsible, grown by a farmerwho eats a simple diet of rice and beans, and has no problem separating different categories of recyclables. Perhaps you will remember to separate your data, and store it on an information infrastructure based on an environmentally-responsible combination of SSD, FC, SATA and tape, to reduce your costs and minimize your carbon footprint.

With mixed emotions, Jon Peake announced he will retire from IBM next week. Jon is known as thefather of IBM Virtual Tape Server (VTS), the industry's first virtual tape system, announced in 1996and generally available in 1997.One of my 19 patents was for the VTS pre-migration capability, and as lead architect for DFSMS, I worked closely with Jon and his tape systems team to ensure its success.

At his retirement celebration, Jon was awarded the coveted "Project Bulldog" jacket, which has an interesting history.

In response to IBM's 1996 VTS announcement, the top StorageTek (STK) tape sales teams and most of the dedicated tape technicians were invited to a global assembly at a fancy resort in Winter Park, CO (about 90 miles west of STK's Louisville headquarters) in early 1997. The gathering was named Project Bulldog, after Ron Korngiebel, STK's director of competitive marketing, who I am told had voice and facial resemblance to justify the project moniker. Ron had recruited Fred Moore, Steve Blenderman, and other prized engineers as speakers. I have seen both Fred and Steve speak at various conferences such as SHARE and GUIDE, and agree they are high quality speakers.

The goal was to have STK's brightest in Louisville go down in the trenches, work the field guys into a frenzy, defend STK Tape at any cost, and send IBM packing. At the end of the two day fest, many participants received the coveted Project Bulldog jacket.

Former STKers who now work at IBM can remember this meeting involved:

Bashing of the [IBM Seascape] architecture approach. The use of commodity servers and componentsto build storage systems continues today in the IBM System Storage DS8000, SAN Volume Controller,XIV, and TS7650 Deduplication solutions.

Explanations how and why IBM's VTS would never work, and how only STK virtual tape would make it in the market. Today, IBM is the leader in storage virtualization, both for disk and tape.

Mock interview videos with claims that IBM could never figure out how to attach IBM drives to the STK Silo. I was a big proponent of this, having visited customers who specifically asked for IBM to sell its better, faster IBM drives into their existing STK silos. At first, upper management was hesitant to do this, but the IBMengineers worked out what changes were needed, and today many STK tape automation libraries run with IBM tape drives.

While some analysts frowned on Sun's [2005 acquisition of StorageTek], IBM was delighted, given Sun's previous track record in storagecompany acquisitions. I joke that we are still picking up confetti in the hallways of IBM's Tucsonlab. I was in New York city when I heard Sun's announcement, and it didn't take long for STKemployees offering me their resumes.Since then, many STK engineers, technicians and sales team have left Sun, many coming over to IBM.Back then, there were many intelligent and talented people working for StorageTek, and IBM is gladto have hired them.

With the resurgence of interest in tape systems, from dealing with new legislation for long term retention of electronic data to a focus on energy efficiency, Jon leaves much like a champion retiring at the top of his game.

These disk capacities can have up to 25x times their effective capacity with IBM's HyperFactorin-line deduplication capability. So the smallest 7TB model could be as effective as 175TB of traditionaldisk storage.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) v6

After years and years in development, IBM announces[TSM v6]. Here's a quick summary of the key features:

DB2 instead of an internal database

For years, people have complained that IBM used its own internal relational database. This was becausewhen TSM was first launched back in 1993, the DB2 did not have all the features on all of the various server platforms that TSM needed. Today, DB2is the leading relational database on all the key platforms that TSM server runs on, and therefore good enough for use within Tivoli Storage Manager. If you don't already have DB2, it is included for use with TSM v6.1 at no additional charge. Do you have to become a DB2 expert to use TSM? No! The TSM administration commands have been updated to hide all the complexity of DB2 away, behind the scenes. You now just use TSM commands to administer the database,as you did before. IBM will provide conversion utilities to help existing TSM customers migrate to thisnew database environment.

Better Operational Reporting

Another big complaint was that TSM had fixed reporting, and administrators that wanted customized reportsoften had to resort to purchasing third party products. With the change over to DB2, TSM now enables youto create your own reports using Eclipse's Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools[BIRT]! If you haven't used BIRT, you can downloada free open source copy and start playing around with its capabilities. This is combined with a revamped GUI that provides a customizable dashboard using IBM's Integrated Solutions Console (ISC)infrastructure.

Software-based Deduplication

Lastly, IBM has incorporated deduplication capability within the TSM v6.1 software for its own diskstorage pools. This is done in a post-process manner so as to dedupe all of your legacy backup dataas well, not just the new stuff, without impacting the current TSM server performance.

At this point, you might be thinking "Wait, what about IBM TS7650 ProtecTIER deduplication?" which is really two questions.

Can I use TSM v6.1 with IBM TS7650 ProtecTIER?

Yes, however since TSM progressive incremental method is vastly more efficientthan other backup products like Veritas NetBackup or EMC Legato NetWorker, the TS7650 may only get 10x reductionof TSM backups, versus up to 25x with full-backups-every-night backup schemes. TSM only dedupes itsdisk storage pools, so it won't dedupe data directed at tape systems like the TS7650 or othertape libraries. This avoids the "double dedupe" concern.

When should I use TSM's software version versus TS7650's hardware deduplication?

This is a positioning question. For now, the cut-over point is about 10TB per night backup processing. If youbackup more than 10TB per night, TS7650 hardware may be the better approach. If you are a smaller customer nowhere near that volume of data, then using TSM v6.1 software deduplication may be a morecost-effective solution. If you start small, and grow beyond 10TB per night, it is easy to bring ina TS7650 into an existing TSM environment and migrate the data over.

Sub-capacity Licensing

If you run TSM server on a logical partition (LPAR) or virtual guest OS under VMware ESX, Xen or Microsoft'sHyper-V environment, why should you have to license it for the whole box? With TSM v6.1, you nowcan pay for only the amount of processors you use, down to a single core even.If you currently run TSM v5 on z/OS, you can migrate over to TSM v6.1 server for Linux on System z totake advantage of cost savings using IFL engines.

IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLM) v1.0

Don't let the "v1.0" scare you, this is the successor to IBM's Encryption Key Manager (EKM) that hasthousands of clients using today with IBM encrypting tape drives. The new TKLM adds support for full disk encryption (FDE) drives--like those for the DS8000 I mentioned in [yesterday's post]--as well as new features to support key rotation for compliance and business controls.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center

Last, but not least, we have IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center [TSPC]. No, that is not a typo. IBM is renaming IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center to Tivoli Storage Productivity Center toavoid trademark conflicts with the [Professional Golfer's Association].

This is not just renaming existing product. Here some key improvements:

TSPC brings back together Productivity Center Standard Edition (Disk, Tape, SAN and Data) with Productivity Center for Replication, which were separate at birth a few years ago.